Top Rental Sites – Keyword Rankings Comparison

My last post compared the top rental sites in the U.S. based on their rankings in Google for competitive terms. But it left me with some questions. For example, does Rentals.com challenge Apartments.com for keywords like “apartments for rent”? So as a followup, I wanted to share some competitive keyword data that didn’t make it into the original post.

Some quick observations before getting into the data:

It is incredibly hard to dominate multiple categories, so sites are picking their battles carefully (see Apartments.com vs. Rentals.com).

Craigslist ranks perennially well in most categories – property managers take note.

Vacation rentals is a different ball game; the top 10 sites don’t perform well in this category.

Thanks to Google’s visualization API, I was able to put together the following interactive chart to allow you to mix and match the data for yourself. Here are some quick pointers:

Remember that #1 is the best rank, so in this case lower is better.

Select any combination of values, and the chart will change. Cool, huh?

Hold your mouse over elements of the chart to get more details.

Interactive Keyword Rankings Chart

Make head-to-head comparisons by selecting from the two lists below:

Top Rental Sites

Apartments.com

Rentals.com

Rent.com

ApartmentGuide.com

Craigslist.com

ApartmentRatings.com

RentalHouses.com

Move.com

MyNewPlace.com

RentalHomesPlus.com

Top Rental Keywords

apartments 28% of traffic

rentals 23%

apartment 10%

apartments for rent 6%

vacation rentals 5%

homes for rent 5%

homes rent 3%

rent houses 3%

apartments rent 3%

houses for rent 1%

vacation rental 1%

apartment rental 1%

rent house 1%

apartment rent 1%

rental homes 1%

house for rent 1%

apartment rentals 1%

rental home 1%

house rentals 1%

rental house 1%

Note: if you are a stakeholder in any of these companies and would like more data, contact me (360-718-9934). As always, suggestions and critiques are welcome.

Excellent post. The entire reason we launched RentClicks was because we didn’t see any competing sites in the non-apartment space. From the beginning, we completely wrote off the entire apartment industry. I think that going after multiple categories can only serve to dilute the effectiveness for each category. I think that is why we see a couple of the big apartment sites, Apartment Guide, and Apartments.com with home rental offerings as well. It will be interesting to see how well they keep those lines drawn, or if the sites continue to blur together.

Neat tool. I really got a kick out of using it. I’d be curious to see how these site stack up when people run metro specific searches like, Boston Apartments. I imagine more searches are run with the metro in the search term. Do you have any data on that?

I think other awesome tools that can help property managers is property management software from RealPage or Buildium (the two biggest). Has anyone had experience with these or could provide any other feedback?